Tatar
language - one of the Turkic languages.
Spoken in the Republic of Tatarstan,
in a number of districts of Bashkortostan,Mari El,Udmurtia,Mordovia, in many other regions of
Russia as well as in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan
and Turkmenistan. The number of the Tatars in Russia is 5 million 522,1
thousand. 85,6 % of them regard Tatar as their mother tongue, 14,2 % Russian.
Tatar language is also spoken among the Bashkirs
(227,8 thousand Bashkirs regard it as their mother tongue) and Maris.

The oldest surviving Tatar texts date back to the 13th century. The
modern literary language was developed under the influence of spoken Tatar
since the middle of the 19th century. The phonetics and lexicon of the
literary language are close to the Central dialect, morphology to the Western
dialect. The writing system was based on the Arab script until 1927, then
on Latin, and from 1939 - Cyrillic script. A decision to switch into the
Latin alphabet has been made recently.